Supposedly, these obstacles could be overcome only by an accumulation strategy restoring rapid capital accumulation and ‘modernising’ the economy and society. This would require ‘rolling back’ the state through expenditure cuts, extensive privatisations, liberalisation of trade, finance and capital flows, and reforms of the fiscal, tax and social security systems. The fiscal reforms should reduce inflation; financial liberalisation would increase domestic savings and investment, and import liberalisation would cheapen inputs, increase the availability of quality consumer goods and reduce the monopoly power of inefficient producers and greedy trade unions. Finally, the liberalisation of capital movements would attract direct and portfolio inflows to fund economic restructuring. These policy reforms would raise productivity and improve the balance of payments. Economic liberalisation and the integration of Brazilian capital into transnational conglomerates would drive a virtuous circle of growth turning Brazil into a developed economy. This strategic shift was supported by strong pressures from the US government, the international financial institutions, the media and foreign and Brazilian capital, and validated by claims of success of comparable countries, especially Argentina, Mexico and South Korea.

We infer from the text that:

Item 0 - The State does not intervene in Neoliberalism set of rules;

You might suppose that the feud could be settled by testing rival claims. Alas, macroeconomics rarely works this way. Macroeconomists cannot run experiments as laboratory scientists can. Statistical analysis of the world is muddied by the vast number of variables, many of which are correlated with the thing whose effect the economist is trying to isolate. Macroeconomic arguments tend not to produce winners and losers: only those with more influence and those with less. Post-Keynesian ideas were never proven false, unlike the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. Rather, they declined in status as mainstream Keynesianism rose.

Stupor models

Mainstream Keynesianism was tarnished in turn amid the inflation of the 1970s. The monetarism which then gained favour floundered a decade later, when central banks targeting money-supply growth discovered that the link between their targets and inflation had vanished. Keynesians regrouped and built “new Keynesian” models which became the workhorses of much recent analysis. They too have disappointed. In 2016 Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the IMF, described the workhorses as “seriously flawed”, “based on unappealing assumptions”, and yielding implications that are “not convincing”. Paul Romer, a Nobel laureate last year, wrote in 2016 that “for more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards”.